Your "rule of X" type character building guides?

[Bloodstone]

Re: Your "rule of X" type character building guides?

 

Well, it's not just a supers thing. It can happen in any multiplayer online game really. Ultima Online, the first MMORPG, is the game that spawned the term.

 

Hopefully, Cryptic learned a few things from the many poor balance decisions they made with City of Heroes and can apply those lessons to Champions Online.

 

But you know what they say about people that don't learn from history...

[bubba smith]

Re: Your "rule of X" type character building guides?

 

Players "gaming the system" is one of the primary reasons I have little interest in MMOs in general. While it might be possible to build The Ultimate Combat Wombat© in an online game' date=' that's not going to happen in my FTF game and none of our players would even try.[/quote']

combat wombat ?

that sounds like a toon disney/jetix show thanks for the chuckle

[poptoad]

Re: Your "rule of X" type character building guides?

 

...we felt it's still useful to establish a baseline for how powerful the characters should be within rather broad parameters - i.e.; is this the X-Brats' date=' the Avengers, or the Justice League?[/quote']

 

Well, we do THAT much. Our teen superhero campaign started as a 100 + 100 game; our golden age campaign was a 150 + 100 game. Beyond that, anything goes, with a few caveats (e.g., the NND 0 END continuous auto-fire attack) and the guiding hand of the GM.

 

Trust the point system...trust the point system....

 

But a good GM is the most crucial. In a way, no rules on active power totals allow the GM to be more laissez-faire, because we're left to heck alone about how to spend our points. The GM can concentrate on simple questions: is this character unbalancing? What's the character conception? He's not counting whether certain combinations of multipower slots go over the allowed active point total.

 

I like gaming that way. It feels respectful.

 

It probably also helps that our campaigns are relatively low point total ones.

[The Main Man]

Re: Your "rule of X" type character building guides?

 

Usually I use Active Points, but when I use a Rule of X I generally go by:

 

Maximum Damage Classes

Maximum OCV with said attack

Maximum DCV -3 (to account for free dodge maneuver)

Maximum DEF, in Active Points, accounting for Hardened and Resistant, divided by 5

Maximum SPDx2

Maximum STUN/5

[Trebuchet]

Re: Your "rule of X" type character building guides?

 

Well, we do THAT much. Our teen superhero campaign started as a 100 + 100 game; our golden age campaign was a 150 + 100 game. Beyond that, anything goes, with a few caveats (e.g., the NND 0 END continuous auto-fire attack) and the guiding hand of the GM.

 

Trust the point system...trust the point system....

 

But a good GM is the most crucial. In a way, no rules on active power totals allow the GM to be more laissez-faire, because we're left to heck alone about how to spend our points. The GM can concentrate on simple questions: is this character unbalancing? What's the character conception? He's not counting whether certain combinations of multipower slots go over the allowed active point total.

 

I like gaming that way. It feels respectful.

 

It probably also helps that our campaigns are relatively low point total ones.

Well, our Champions game is now in its 16th year so I figure we're doing something right. We started as a 4th Edition group using 150 + 100; now we've got several characters over 400 character points on a 250 + 100 5th Edition base. We've also dumped point caps in favor of loose guidelines and protection of schtick. It seems to working pretty well for our group.

 

I - well, we actually - also like gaming that way. It is respectful (to GMs and players alike). Since 5 of our eight players also GM on a fairly regular basis, there's significant incentive to be reasonable. Abuse the system, and you might find yourself facing the same kind of abuse when you're on the other side of the GM's screen. More importantly, we trust each other. It's nice to be able to spend XP on character development and defenses against opponents instead of defending against the GM.